1. Field
Example aspects of the present invention generally relate to provisioning routes in a network and, more particularly, to methods and apparatus to provision routes interactively.
2. Description of the Related Art
In a communication network having a plurality of interconnected nodes, there may be multiple routes that data can traverse from a source node to a drop node (i.e., a node where the data will be used). There may be a direct link between the source node and the drop node, and/or there may be a plurality of routes from the source node to the drop node via one or more intermediate nodes. Particular routes between a source node and each drop node are provisioned (i.e., established) so that network equipment knows how to route data to a particular drop node. The information regarding provisioned routes can be stored in a routing table that a node uses to determine the appropriate route to send or forward data (the routing table can be stored in a computer program memory, for example), or the network can be engineered to ensure that data flows in a certain way (i.e., network equipment can be wired or cabled to constrain the flow of data in a specific direction).
Various techniques are known for automatically provisioning network routes to optimize transmission characteristics. For example, techniques are known that automatically optimize the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) or that automatically determine the shortest path between nodes, the fewest number of links to be traversed between nodes, or the minimum cost path between nodes (where a weighted value or “cost” is assigned to each network link). However, these optimizing techniques do not account for factors other than transmission characteristics that may be important to a network planner.